It was hard times. The first Daley was still mayor, and he took the south side for granted. Instead of the social programs and real investment that were needed, he trucked in free swimming pools in the summer and created scholarships to bad city colleges where a degree didn’t help you much. It was putting a Band-Aid on a cancer, and everybody knew it.
This was the south side in which I found myself after the war. I was hooked on drugs, and I came back to a neighborhood that no longer was growing. Instead, it had a feeling of stasis. There would be no new people or stuff. Now it was just trying to hang on, and criminals were starting to fight over whatever was left.
When the world around you is changing for the worse—and everybody is filled with the same feeling of sickness and unease— turning to crime is not so hard for a young man to do. There were gangs—not quite like what we have today, but still technically gangs. (What we had in the 1970s was like the Cro-Magnon man of gangs. Evolving, but not there yet.)
I was never a major player. I carried a gat but never shot anybody. Mostly, I just did B and E’s. A little stick-up work now and then. A whole lot of intimidation. And I’m basically high the whole time.
And then God saved me. There is no other way to say it.
God “accelerated” my life, is how I like to put it. I was “fast-forwarded” to rock bottom ahead of everybody else. He let me reach my lowest moment after just five years, when I was still salvageable. Still young. Most young men who choose drugs and crime can keep it up a lot longer—ten, fifteen, even twenty years before they want to get out—and by that time they’re just dead husks that don’t have long to live.
The walking dead indeed.
The Bible tells us that the wages of sin are death. Nothing in the entire book is more demonstrably true.
And I can remember the moment when I changed like it was yesterday. My best friend—or the man I thought was my best friend—had been shot to death the night before in a robbery. We’d been upping our intake of pills and blow to superhuman levels. We knew we couldn’t maintain that lifestyle, but we were crazy. We did it anyway, because . . . well, I don’t fully know why we did it. I still don’t. We should’ve stopped. We should’ve known it could only be the road to ruin. Maybe we were blinded by the pleasure of it all, in love with the dark magic of our existence. Maybe we were just young, high, and stupid.
I remember looking at myself in the long, cracked mirror that we’d propped against the wall of the basement of the dingy two-flat in South Shore where we were living . . . and it was like God touched me. Like, he physically touched me. He said, “I’m going to take these bad things from you and make it right. It’s going to happen right now.”
I flushed my pills and cocaine down the toilet—trying not to think about how much money they had cost—and left my apartment. I started walking with no destination in mind. I walked down to the decrepit shopping strip on Jeffery Boulevard, not knowing what was happening or what to do next. I was just walking.
Then God tested me.
I suddenly started thinking about how I would never take another pill in my life—never feel that warm rush that made everything okay, that let you relax about things, that made sex feel like the greatest thing ever (even if it was with some hoochie you didn’t really care for). I started thinking about how I’d driven away my family and all my childhood friends. I had no real job or prospects. What would come next? What could?
A horrible panic seized me. My chest felt like it was going to explode. I had this strange tension running down of the backs of my legs, like a cramp that wouldn’t go away. My heart was beating fast. (I had this new awareness of my heart, too. I was afraid it would wear out, and I had no idea how to make it slow down.)
Then I thought to myself: So . . . this is probably death. I’ve never died before, so I can’t say for sure, but this feels about right.
I stopped right there on Jeffery Boulevard, clutching at my chest with everyone looking at me like I was crazy. I started looking around, turning in circles. I could have gone to a hospital. I could have called for a policeman or an ambulance. But then— looming above the other buildings—I saw the steeple of The Church of Heaven’s God in Christ Lord Jesus.
Go there, my brain said to me.
So I stopped spinning, and I walked over to that church. It wasn’t the biggest or best church in South Shore. It had a small congregation for its size. The pastor was nobody I had heard of, certainly nobody powerful in the community. The building was an old synagogue that had been converted to a Christian church in the 1940s when the last of the Jews in the neighborhood gave up and moved away. The addition of a cross and steeple left it looking not quite right, like a lizard that has scurried underneath a cast-off shell and insists it’s now a turtle.
These shortcomings didn’t matter at that moment. To me, it looked absolutely perfect.
When I reached the church, I was too scared to go inside. I didn’t know a soul there. Also, I thought that if I stopped moving— like in a pew to pray—my heart would explode and kill me. Instead of going in, I walked circles around that church, peering up at the dark lead glass windows and the steeple that didn’t match the roof. After a few minutes, I began to feel calmer. I still felt like I might die, but I felt like if I died, that it would be all right. It was up to God now, and not up to me.
And you know what? God let me live.
After about half an hour or so, a man came out of the church (I later learned he was a deacon named Reynolds) and looked at me. I must have been quite a sight—troublemaker in a thug’s coat with the rolling eyes of a maniac. He probably thought I was casing the joint to rob it. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t tell me to skedaddle. He just looked at me—up, down, and all around—to make plain they knew I was there. Then he went back inside.
The next Sunday I attended services. Sixth months later, I was sitting in my first class at divinity school.
I’ll always regret that part of my life. I’ll never be fine with the fact that I was a drug-fueled stickup man for most of my young adulthood. That I robbed women, children, and the elderly. It will always be with me.
You don’t “get better.”
You don’t “get over it.”
You maintain.
You maintain, and—when you can—you try to help people. That’s the only way it ever gets a little less awful.
Sitting in my car in Humboldt Park—looking at the man next to me who is also scared shitless—I realize where it is that we need to go.
“If this is happening all over the city, then people are gonna head to church.”
“The church?” the man asks, as if I have invoked the notion of religion.
“My church . . . where I’m Pastor. If their relatives are coming back from the dead and it might be the end of the world, then people are going to be heading for the church. It’s where I would go. Where anybody would. They’re going to go talk to Jesus”
The young man nods thoughtfully.
“You’re welcome to come with me,” I tell him. “It’s down in South Shore. We can be there in thirty minutes, maybe less”
“Yeah, okay. I sure as shit don’t wanna go back to my house.”
“Do you have family you need to check on right now?”
“No, they’re back in Iowa” he says, not looking at me. “I have an ex-wife, but she went to Florida for the week.”
“I see....Then you should come with me.”
I put the Chrysler back into drive.
“You seem really certain,” he says.
For the first time, he smiles.
“The Bible shows us that in times of portent and mystery, almost nothing is a coincidence,” I tell him.
“Oh” says the young man. “Well okay then. Let’s go.”
We speed south through Humboldt Park, its verdant lawns and ball fields covered with a thin dusting of snow. I notice one person—or zombie—milling about, waist-deep in the center of a nearly frozen pond. Probably a zombie. I
t is far too cold for a swim tonight. Sirens continue to rise and fall on the streets around us. (I think any kind of siren anybody owns is going off tonight.)
Occasionally, I see groups of people who clearly aren’t the risen dead standing around in front of their houses. They’re trying to figure out what’s going on. They talk to one another, like neighbors might do during a power outage or when there’s a fire on their street.
We drive beneath an overpass with a stalled (or possibly abandoned) train on top of it and enter an African-American neighborhood called Garfield Park. It’s a rough place, like South Shore. More criminals released from prison return to Garfield Park than to any other neighborhood in Chicago. I wonder how the residents are faring? The streets are deserted. The snow on the sidewalks is undisturbed.
Next to me, the young man—Ben—starts talking into his cell phone.
“Caroline? Hey, how are you guys? How’s Florida? Hey listen, this is going to sound crazy, but I’m not joking, okay? This is not a joke . . . have you seen the internet videos about zombies and stuff this week? Yeah, well it’s real. The zombies are real. I just got fucking attacked by one. Is it happening there in Florida? Is . . . hello? Caroline? Caroline?!”
Ben looks down at his phone and shakes it like an Etch A Sketch.
“Here, try mine.” I pull my phone out of my coat pocket and hand it to him. Ben accepts it and tries to make a call.
“Nothing” he says. “No service. What the fuck is this!?”
“Can you bring up the internet?” I ask. “See what the news websites say.”
“Fucking nothing,” Ben says after a few tries. “It just gives a ‘No Service’ message.”
“I guess the whole grid is down,” I tell him. “Everybody is trying to make phone calls at the same time . . . and trying to use the internet. The system can’t handle it. It’s what happened in New York on 9/11. I was there that day for a fellowship conference in Queens. Our cell phones failed for most of the morning. They’ll probably have it fixed in the next few hours.”
“The next few hours . . .” Ben says, as if this is devastating news. “Something tells me the next few hours are going to be really fucking important, Pastor.”
I watch the road and nod. I do not disagree.
Maria Ramirez
As I gun the engine on my Jeep and pull out of the parking garage underneath the Trump Tower, all I can think about is how if I saw one zombie that means that there are more zombies. It’s like seeing a cockroach. Those things don’t roll solo. You’ve got an infestation, and the only way to deal with it is extreme violence.
Kicking the ass of thousands of zombies is going to be a big job. There’s only one thing that matters more to me right now...my family. I merge onto Highway 94—in traffic that is surprisingly light—and dig my phone out of my purse.
I try the house first. It rings and rings with no answer, which is not surprising; my mother is usually in bed by nine and has a habit of silencing the ringer. I try her cell next, which goes straight to voicemail. Crap.
That leaves my sister, Yuliana, who is an even dodgier prospect. She’s seventeen and has been in the habit of sneaking out at night to see this twitchy kid I don’t like named Santiago. (He’s not in a gang, but some of his friends are. My sister wonders how I can tell this, and it’s like, I’ve been around the block, little sis. I grew up in Logan Square, too!) Also, my sister hardly uses her phone for calls, insisting on doing virtually all of her communication by text. This being the case, I hastily pound one out as I careen through the snow-dusted roads.
Yulie. Where R U? Where is mom? Need to talk ASAP. Will be home in 10 mins. Stay indoors. No joke.
I hit send, and wait for a response. Sometimes Yuliana can be lightning-fast with a reply, like she has been waiting for it. This time, there is no response. Nothing at all. Not even a damn emoticon.
I try again.
“R U there? Bad things r happening.” If that doesn’t intrigue her, nothing will. Aaaaaand.nothing will.
I wait and wait, but she does not reply. I double-check the volume on my ringer. I look at my ‘Sent Messages’ folder and make sure both of my texts went through. They did.
Still.no response.
I take the exit at Fullerton and race toward the little blue house where I live with my mother and sister. Something is wrong in my neighborhood. At first, it’s hard to say exactly what. Despite the cold, there are a lot of people standing around—like how the queues get crazy at bus stops when the El has a breakdown. But these people are just chatting with each other . . . and other funny things. A few of them are drinking beers outside, which you can’t do. In front of Quencher’s Bar, people have carried their glasses out onto the street. Some are even holding homemade weapons—clubs and bats and things.
So then...I’m not the only one who knows.
I keep on driving and the not-rightness doesn’t go away. It is everywhere. Even the houses that are dark and quiet manage to be dark and quiet in a bad, ominous way. Something is definitely wrong.
After a few blocks, the house comes into view. The lights are out. There’s no sign of my mother’s car. Fuck.
I pull into the drive and just sit there for a moment. I look at the front door through the window of my Jeep. I’ll be honest, I’m scared to go inside. It’s my home—where I live with the two people in the world I love the most—but now it feels like a haunted house or something. I scan the shadows in the nearby alleys. Who knows how many zombies they hold?
Come on girl. Time to go.
I exit the Jeep and advance toward the front door. Then I pause and return to the Jeep and fish a couple of drumsticks out of my bag. (If it worked before . . .)
Still edgy, I stalk up to the front door and dig out my keys. I open it slowly, expecting.I don’t know. The inside is dark and quiet.
“Mom?”
“Yuliana?”
Nothing.
Then I notice that a light has been left on—at the back of the house, in the kitchen.
I make my way over. On the dinner table is a notepad with writing on it. The notepad is my sister’s, but the hand is clearly my mother’s.
Maria, your father called and we need to meet him at his house. It’s serious. Tried to call you but the phone and internet stopped working. Be safe. Meet us at your father’s.
Double fuck.
If there’s one thing that could make this worse, it’s my father.
I sit in the kitchen for a moment and consider my options. I soon realize that there aren’t any. I feel my body beginning to relax. Which is bad. The adrenaline that started with the zombie in the garage and got another injection when I couldn’t raise my family on the phone is now beginning to ebb. A part of me suddenly says, “Relax into this chair and do nothing, Maria” Then adds, “Or maybe crawl upstairs and lie down in your bed under that giant picture of Stewart Copeland. Drift off, and when you next awaken, all your problems are likely to be solved.”
Fuck fucking you.
I force myself to my feet, take a slug of orange juice from the carton in the fridge, and head out the door. Back inside my Jeep, I lock the doors, fasten my seatbelt, and get back on the city streets.
My fucking dad. Goddamn it.
When I reach Kedzie Boulevard, I start heading south.
Ben Bennington
We get there, and the pastor is right.
The Church of Heaven’s God in Christ Lord Jesus—which, yes, appears to be the actual name—is crowded like it’s Christmas or Easter. It’s a venerable structure with a tall steeple that somehow doesn’t quite match the rest of it. A group of official-looking men has gathered at the entrance. They gesture and point as the pastor’s car comes into view. They have been waiting for him.
Mack pulls up to the front of the building, and the crowd parts. We exit the Chrysler. Everyone is looking at Mack like he’s a celebrity—a rock star or something—but they seem hesitant to be the first to speak. Younger people are helping groups of the el
derly into the church. A member of this elderly contingent finally cries, “Oh bless my soul, Pastor. I knew you’d come.”
Several of the men standing near the church door have half-concealed guns. In the shadows by the side of the building, I see a corpse on the ground. The picket from a fence has been shoved through its forehead. The body looks like it died a long, long time before this latest injury. A group of kids is looking at it, and one is poking it thoughtfully with a stick. Moments later, a disapproving mother appears and shoos the children into the church.
“Pastor, what kept you?” one of the armed men asks.
“Attending to Ms. Washington,” says the pastor, and his eyes betray a strange sadness or guilt. “She is . . . no longer with us.”
“Pastor, do you know what’s happening?” asks another man. “Have you seen what’s on TV?”
“I know that the dead are walking among us,” Mack replies. “I know that some of them are eating people. I saw that myself. What does the news say?”
“It’s happening all over the city, maybe all over the state,” says a nervous looking man with glasses and a black fedora.
“It’s national news,” says a man in a suit who lets his Desert Eagle dangle conspicuously from one hand.
“International news” says another. “Everybody talking about what’s happening in Illinois.”
“Pastor Mack, the congregation needs to hear from you,” says fedora-guy. “They’ve been waiting.”
Mack sighs deeply. “I’m sure they have. I’m sorry that I was delayed.”
“Let’s get you inside, Pastor,” someone says.
The group parts to allow the pastor to pass. I wonder if I should follow. Nobody has acknowledged my presence.
Then one of the armed men standing guard by the door says “Pastor, who’s your friend?”
Everybody turns and looks at me.
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